(A Louisiana classroom.)

School segregation does not exist in America. It’s a thing of the distant past  It’s so far in the past that the people who experienced it are on the older side. (Sorry Kamala, you didn’t experience actual segregation.)

But simply because something exists doesn’t mean that the government won’t give up its powers.

First, the bar was lowered so that school segregation stopped being a thing of policy and became any concentration of white students or black students, leading to busing, backlashes, and assorted ugliness.

Consent decrees kept some states and areas under perpetual monitoring over events from 70 years ago.

Now there’s outrage because the Trump administration and Republicans are contemplating winding down a regulatory regime fighting something that no longer exists.

(Note: while school segregation as a government mandate does not exist, colleges often offer voluntary segregation to black students as a tool of empowerment. This is considered perfectly good by the civil rights industry.)

Instead of closing the books on this chapter, the Left would like to keep it open for their own power.

Nationally, more than 300 desegregation orders are estimated to still be on the books from the 1960s and 1970s, when school districts resistant to integration were put under the supervision of federal courts. In the decades since, many orders have gone dormant, with little federal enforcement.

In Louisiana, one of several Southern states with the bulk of remaining orders, the attorney general, with the support of the governor, is reviewing orders statewide and has vowed to work with school districts to “officially put the past in the past.”

The Justice Department has already dismissed one order, in a district south of New Orleans, which was left open for decades by mistake. Federal officials are open to lifting others.

“I don’t think it serves the interest of justice to have ancient consent decrees out there,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general over civil rights under President Trump, who said her office would consider requests for dismissal on a case-by-case basis.

In many cases, school districts are still under federal oversight because they never proved that they desegregated, said GeDá Jones Herbert, chief legal counsel for Brown’s Promise, a group that supports school integration. An open desegregation order is a legal tool for students to take a district back to court “and say, ‘hey they are still not doing what they need to do,’” she added.

Doing what? No one is forcibly segregating anyone. The idea that we need to have orders from the 1960s on the books that no cares about in order to let leftist groups intimidate schools seems abusive at best.

It’s time for Americans to move on from that entire era. It’s the Left that wants to keep racism alive.